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Good morning... although I feel like I should confess that I wrote most of today's newsletter last night after dinner, so good evening as well.
I broke from my regular writing practice to make sure I could make an early morning yoga class happening this morning, that some of my friends are planning to attend. We are trying to find ways to meet more regularly, even if just briefly. This summer, I'm trying to do more of things things that I frequently espouse in this newsletter: more movement, more music, and most importantly, more time with other people. Unbreaking
Unbreaking is a sense-making project from the good people who did the yeoman's work of The Covid Tracking Project. It is as journalist Ed Young describes it:
Unbreaking is written for you, for us. Its purpose is to “help orient and ground our communities in clear and rigorously cited explanations of what’s happening to our government and why it matters.” The site consists of regularly updated explainers, written by the founders and a larger team of volunteers, that track the attacks on our institutions, why they matter, and the countermoves that are in play. As the team writes, “We believe that mapping the damage done and its human costs—and the pushback and resilience work already underway—is necessary groundwork for building and retaining political agency.”
Six pages are currently live, on: the federal workforce, food safety, Medicaid, the postal service, trans healthcare, and medical research funding. More will come. But if you want to start somewhere,try the page on medical research funding to see the extent of what this administration is destroying, and why it costs us all. It also doubles as perhaps the best explanation I’ve read of why research funding actually matters, whom it serves, and how.
I cannot recommend the site highly enough. The pages are so well written, so clearly structured, and so helpful in helping us make sense of the chaotic mess we’re in. I’ve said repeatedly that I likened the pandemic to a raging torrent that threatened to sweep us away, and my reporting as an attempt to create a stable platform from which people could observe the deluge without drowning in it. The same applies to Unbreaking. It’s exactly what we need right now.
As funding for journalism and public broadcasting recedes, we will need more civilian and civic efforts to help us collectively make sense of our changing world. Usufruct
Recently, I returned to an online publication that I once referred to readers in 2022. It was called MOLD and it was a print magazine dedicated to re-designing the future of food and it was sunset just last month.
As I idly scrolled through its past archive of online articles, I paused at a particular title: Usufruct. I had just learned that word days ago. When I first stumbled on the word, it was in course of my research into the concept of Library Socialism, which I sadly discovered was just a bundle of ideas that a couple of podcasters came up with through the process of several hours of comedy improv. The MOLD essay of Usufruct, on the other hand, was immediately gratifying. It starts with this opening paragraph: There is so much beauty in words, even the most technical, the most obnubilate, the ones trivialised by business parlance, those we use without thinking twice. I like to take words and their entymologies as a point of departure for intellectual exploration. For instance, “opportunity” is a word I used to despise but now love after learning its etymology. It comes from the Latin expression ob portum veniens. Ob, towards; portum, port; veniens, coming. “Opportune” are the favourable winds carrying your boat to the port. How poetic, how delicately connected to the ancient history of seafaring. Next time you cringe hearing someone speaking of a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to describe a car loan or a job offer, close your eyes and imagine a saline breeze caressing your face.
And then this follows: I would like to consider soil in light of an ancient, obscure, sweet word: usufruct. A legal term widely used in civil law jurisdiction, according to The Oxford Dictionary, “usufruct” describes “The right to enjoy the use and advantages of another’s property short of the destruction or waste of its substance.” It comes once again from a Latin expression, usus et fructus, meaning “use and enjoyment.” Fructus also survived in a very common everyday word: “fruit.” In 12th-century French, fruit variously signified the fruit one eats for dessert, the concept of harvest or, most broadly, any virtuous action. In the centuries that followed, the use of the word evolved to describe income from agricultural produce and then, simply, economic profit.
I have always had a certain prejudice against starting an essay with a definition because I couldn't shake off the feeling that readers would think I was making a hamburger. But this essay to me, is a lovely example of how sharing the origins of a word not only sheds light on how a word used to be used, but it reminds us of a life that used to be different, and that fundamental change is possible, over time. I don't have a particular love of entomology, but I have been a faithful listener to The Allusionist for years because I admire and love Helen Zaltzman's ability to tell so many deeply human stories about and through language. And it was when I was looking for a link to Helen's list of words from the dictionary, when I discovered that I probably first heard the word usufruct in way back in September of 2016. Utopia Clicker
I linked to Darius Kazemi's Utopia Clicker in 2023, but I couldn't find anything else beginning with the Letter U, that felt suitable to re-visit in this moment.
Links from Previous Week 26 and 27 IssuesAeolian Links
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